


She Walked Alone

by eris_of_imladris



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst and Feels, Dís Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-25 01:29:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14367987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris_of_imladris/pseuds/eris_of_imladris
Summary: Dís tries to find a way to reconcile the Thorin she knew with the Thorin who led his Company to doom. Takes place after the events of The Hobbit.Written for Legendarium Ladies April 2018 with the April 18 Poetry Prompt - First Cherokee Lesson: Mourning (https://bit.ly/2HQvowF).





	She Walked Alone

She is greeted with bows and with sorrow, with averted eyes and polite coughs and shame so thick she can feel it in the air. 

To all these reactions, her response is the same: quiet acceptance, a nod in return, a clasp of a hand and a smile at a proffered memory, as if she would not then turn when they move on to other things, clasping that memory between her palms as she once held little hands, long ago.

The time for grief, she figures, will be at the funeral. She is practical, and she knows when she is allowed to break down. She has broken that rule exactly once, but she has forgiven herself for that. She was ten, and clinging onto her brother Thorin’s back for dear life, and he told her to close her eyes as the world she knew burned down around her.

She accepts the handshakes and bows and nods, but she still feels the need for the quaking arms and the running body. She needs to feel fear, smell it in the air and bump along with the rumbling feet. But she is one hundred and eighty years old, and no respectable woman of that age would break down. She is supposed to live by reason, the calm voice and soft embrace she gave her sons whenever they were afraid. But when she was ten, there had been no reason, and there is no reason now.

When the messenger appeared at her door, ashen-faced and sweaty, she had been unprepared for him to speak the news. She read it in his eyes, the way his fingers fidgeted on the door, empty hands bearing no message, not even a scrap of hope that even one of the three she sent away had kept their promise to return. But it was strange for her.

When Víli had died, she had waited, staring at the collapsed mine, standing in silence long after she knew nothing could be alive inside. Thorin had never directly spoken to her of the battle that stole their grandfather and brother’s lives, but the first time she had seen the drawn brows and pursed lips that she called his King Face, she had known, without a need for words.

But this new way was strange, with people calling her sons kings and heroes and a dozen other words she never cared for, words that made no sense in her home where she still half expected to hear their clomping feet coming through the door, fingers dipped in the supper, bath water on the ground, bed covers rumpled, shouts of joy and cries of triumph, but all she heard was the wind slamming the door open, breaking a hinge that no one was there to fix.

She traveled then, quietly, back to the mountain she had fled as a child. It smelled the same as it had then, the sickly and rotten scent of the aftermath of battle, a bloody smell that could have been copper in a time of peace – but it was different as well, no one hurried, and the way into the mountain was as easy as approaching the gates that swung open for her.

Inside was noise, but not her noise, and grandeur unlike anything she had remembered. The great columns shed rubble onto the marble floor, the place smelled musty and dark but here and there dwarves scurried, bringing lanterns and wet cloths, bringing life to a place long dead.

They do not belong here, she thinks. Her Fíli and Kíli would have felt as strange in this place as she, looking up at the vastness and thinking instead of her little home in the Blue Mountains, poor and meager but never echoing with emptiness.

It is then that she sees Dáin, and when he intones his head, clasping her hands in his own and telling her for the thousandth time she heard that day that he is so deeply sorry, she bows. Her muscles remember the motion as much as her head remember that he is king now, King Under The Mountain, and for the first time in many years, the title means something.

She had not meant to impose upon him, question anything, but the words had leave her mouth before she has time to reconsider. “May I see it?” she asks, and at first Dáin thinks she speaks of the bodies, but all she cares to see is what drove her brother mad, the great treasure he had spoken of wistfully and angrily and softly and proudly and sometimes, when he thought he was alone, in mourning, a harsh sort of quiet.

Dáin does not deny it, but she sees the look in his eyes, the wondering if this was her means to seek her own death. Would she drown in the gold to avoid living in a world filled with all the riches except the family she had lost? Or, worse, was the gold all that matters to her, even when her whole family is dead? But he relents. Even if she succumbs, she is no threat anymore.

The doors to the great room open, and in the moment before, she wonders exactly what Thorin had seen in there that had changed everything she knew about him. He had been the one to carry her out of the fire, the one who explained why her mother was dead and later, why her son’s father was dead, to an equally vulnerable pair of deep blue eyes. He was the one who stepped in when Víli died, when she was pregnant and destitute, and picked her off the ground, moving into her small home and working backbreaking jobs to keep her and her children fed. He was the one who was always too slim, but if Fíli had asked for more, the meager pickings on Thorin’s plate found their way to his.

She hears the dwarves now in Erebor calling him insane, crazy, murderous, behind the entire war, and then she watches the color drain from their faces when they see her, quickly trying to unsay what they had said. She nods, makes like she accepts it, but she needs more than that. She needs to know why. Only what lay behind the doors can tell her.

They open and she beholds a sea of gold coins, flowing as if they hold a life of their own, twisting and running down deep aurous rivers into the hands of dwarves who sort and pile and count the insurmountable peak in front of them.

She holds a hand to her mouth then, picking up a single coin from the ground and turning it between her callused fingers. She has the hands of a working woman, someone who spent her life trying to earn a meager handful of lesser coins. The one coin she holds in her hands could have paid for any of a thousand things.

They had always been too similar, she and Thorin, stubborn and easy to anger, but equally as filled with determination to improve the lives of those in their charge. She can almost hear his voice as he discovered the gold, running his fingers through the rivulets of coins, his mind not on the grandeur of what lay before him, but on how even one of these coins could have changed everything.

Like the first winter of Kíli’s life, unusually hard and with no money to go around, no one paying blacksmiths what they needed to spend on food. He had worked harder and come home with less, and she had huddled under the blankets with Fíli and the baby as the winds howled, her voice cracking and her lips bleeding as she told them stories of the Erebor Thorin had promised her, a place where they could all be safe.

A single coin could have meant bowls of soup, hot against their cold bodies. It could have meant a moment without worry, a moment when exhaustion was not about to take over, when a dangerous job could be refused, when her husband never would have been in the mines in the first place and they would have raised their children together.

And the coin could have made Thorin a proper king, even in exile, the kind of king he always wanted to be. None of his people would have starved, frozen, died needlessly. They would have mourned Erebor but lived, preserving the stories of their people in a thousand ways, music and books and tales told by elders in good health to children who lived without fear.

A single coin could have changed every memory she held dear, and before her lay thousands, far too many to reckon. And somewhere inside the pile, there had been the Arkenstone, bright and shining and the one thing Thorin had wanted for himself, to feel as though he was a king in truth even if he could protect none of his people.

She has no need to see the Arkenstone. All it would tell her is that she had traded her family for a rock, and all the gold in Erebor means nothing if her boys would not eat the food it could buy.

She closes the door on the gold. There are whispers, wondering why she has the power to do what Thorin could not. They wonder at her silence at the funeral, a grand state affair that turns her sullen brother and rambunctious boys into heroes, shapes neat and polite stories from jagged lives. They whisper about how she cries silently, standing still like the pillars holding up Erebor itself, and how she, once the matter is done, approaches Dáin and asks him if she could mind the ravens.

Ravenhill is a ruin, a battlefield that still needs to be cleaned. It smells as rank as she feels, but she knows this process, the cleaning up after death, the attempt to figure out what comes next. And when the grass begins to grow, and the ruin has a new roof and a path and enough room for a bed and a table and however much food a lone woman needs, she moves there, away from the grandeur, taking only the necessary things.

At night, she is close to them, to the place where they died. The ravens bring no messages at night, but sometimes they perch on her, obscuring her shadow on the ground, and she feels the warmth of their bodies and feels her boys and Thorin beside her, watching expectantly.

I understand you, she tells the ravens. I forgive you comes later, whispered so softly that she wonders if the bird on her shoulder can even hear her. They together watch Erebor gleaming in the distance, too bright for a life like hers, but on that night, she looks down at the worn gold coin in her hands and knows it will change a great many lives.


End file.
